AN EMOTIONAL ROBOTIC PARTNER FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES

In this paper an emotional humanoid robot based on Latent Semantic Analysis is presented. The robot is capable of interacting and entertain human users through the exhibition of spontaneous and non-repetitive emotional behaviours. The Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) paradigm, used to encode the semantics of words through a statistical analysis of a large corpus of text, is employed to build an emotional conceptual space that simulates the emotional associative capabilities of human beings, through “Latent Semantic Behaviours”. The LSA paradigm integrates traditional knowledge representation and intuitive capabilities provided by geometric and sub-symbolic information modelling. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated by implementing the system with the humanoid robot from Aldebaran, Nao.